The sad state of Excel
Having recently gotten a new computer at work I installed Office 2007, and man am I ever regretting that decision. Outlook 2007 isn’t all that bad in my book. Granted some folks (*cough*Trax*cough*) had some serious issues with the system fonts getting all fucked up, but I didn’t encounter that. Instead I’m having problems with Excel.
Now what kind of problems you might ask? Well, managing a lot of users and permissions in our main academic system requires me to keep track of things closely. After all, we don’t want to accidentally grant the wrong access to someone. There are tons of laws we must abide by in terms of who gets access to what. Let’s face it…I’m FERPA and HIPPA’s bitch. But that’s ok…it’s my job after all. 
To make my life a little easier I keep an external record of who has what so I can compare it against what is in the system from time to time and have a more sane version of what’s in there. I call it our Security Matrix, and it is basically an Excel workbook. One sheet holds what classes have what permissions, another which users have which classes, and a last one for special permissions granted to individual users. Very easy, very simple. Lately I’ve been reconciling some changes into the matrix from another spreadsheet I used to communicate account creations and changes with a couple of my colleagues who help me out with creating and changing accounts.
When trying to work on both at the same time Excel 2007 started getting all sorts of flaky. For instance when I’d make a change the grid would disappear for a few seconds, or a set of cells would get blurry. Sometimes all but the cell I was looking at would disappear for a moment. I thought this odd since this hadn’t been a problem in Excel 2003. Shit, it’s a fucking spreadsheet, and my new computer is far more powerful than the last (being much newer), so why the fuck would it start screwing up?
This is, of course, going beyond my main complaint about how you can no longer have more than one instance of Excel running. Thus Alt-Tab is all sorts of fucky now, since you have one item for excel, and one for each workbook under it. Things were much better when each workbook opened a new version of excel. Tabbing between tasks made sense then. Along these lines, though, today when tabbing between the two the one disappeared. The item was on the task bar, but I couldn’t get to it. I couldn’t click on it, I couldn’t do shit. Navigating through the morass of menus we have these days finally got me to it, but it was not maximized like it was before and I couldn’t do much of anything but save and hope it worked.
I restarted Excel, but it happened again about 20 minutes later. Restart again. Finally Excel just crashed. It managed to restart back where I was based on its autosaves or whatnot, but still. Excel fucking crashed working on what are some pretty fucking small documents. I’m not talking thousands of rows. Maybe a couple hundred in each. Mind you, there are no calculations in any of these cells either…just fucking text.
So what the fuck did Microsoft do to Office 2007? I think Ballmer has done everything within his power to make sure that none of Microsoft’s products are worth the CDs they’re sent out on. I haven’t heard a single good thing about Vista from anyone I know who has braved installing it. Shit, NamantH blew out his bass speaker because of Vista’s retarded power management setup. Office 2007 is all but completely worthless and quickly on the way to being uninstalled on my machine. I may go back to 2003…I may just start using Open Office for my work stuff just like I do for home.
Why? Because there is one all important thing to me in computers. One thing that trumps any level of ease of use, extra functionality, ability to customize, or whatnot. What is it? Stability. Plain and simple. If it doesn’t keep running correctly, it may as not run at all, and given how Office 2007 is working at the moment I might as well keep all of my user data on index cards. At least I know I’m not going to lose any of it during a crash.